I’m waiting for my Shinkansen to Tokyo, so bows a good time for a blog post!
As always gacha machines are everywhere. The only notable change to the last trip is that the average price continues to creep up, with even ¥300 machines rare now (especially in Tokyo). While the ‘premium’ ¥500 machines used to have their own small section, they’re now mixed in with others and hardly identified as special.
The contents continue to be as varied as ever, from anime toys/merch to miniatures of things you’d never imagine anyone would want (an x-ray light?!?) to even stranger things like used tickets (!) or foreign coins. There so many different ‘prizes’ now: the top photo showing banks of machines (taken in Tokyo and Sendai) are only a subset of what each location had and all the machines were unique.
About a week ago I watched a documentary on a company that designs gacha prizes. They specialized in ones with gimmicks – like light or sound – and their current most popular one was a stop button like you’d see on a bus that makes the same sound when pushed. Now I want to buy one but I’ve not (yet) seen them in a machine.
The documentary also revealed that the small company it profiled tried to have a few new product series available each week. I just did a Google search and read that there are hundreds (one estimate is 500+) new series released into machines every month, or over 10 a day! No wonder that every six months I visit all the prizes are new 🙂
One of the weirdest I’ve seen this trip is this full face mask. There are four options, which are described as ‘nice guy’, ‘blonde beauty’, ‘zombie’ and ‘alien’. As a rule I don’t open gacha prizes until I get home, but I made an exception for the sake of research:
What do you think?